Track of the Day: 'Narrow Minds'

You're encouraged to go and listen to today's song, "Narrow
Minds," before reading the rest of this post, in which I'll be
disclosing things that may change the way you hear the music. Go ahead,
take a minute to take it in: the slick saxophones, the fluttering ride
cymbals, the vocal harmonies layered as sweet and delicate as baklava.
Go on. I'll wait.

Back? All right. The band is an 11-person French outfit called Angil and the Hiddentracks,
led by the singer-songwriter Mickäel Mottet, and they do something
really special here, assembling a catchy, confident pop song out of
elements--horns, woodwinds, polite jazz drums--usually relegated to the
margins of pop. "Narrow Minds" is like a transmission from a parallel
universe, one where the cool kids play alto sax while the band nerds
stay in their rooms practicing guitar.

The song appears on Ouliposaliva,
a 2008 album where Mottet et al. pull off a neat trick: none of the
music uses the E chord, and none of the lyrics use words containing the
letter E. (The album title is a nod to Oulipo, the constrained-writing
movement whose canon includes Georges Perec's E-less novel La Disparition.)
Once you know this, the temptation may be to dismiss "Narrow Minds" as
a gimmick song, but this would overlook the fact that it's a really
good song, with the constraint not at all apparent on first listen, or
on twentieth. It's an accomplishment on formal terms--but it's also an
odd, marvelous piece of art in its own right.